Politics & Power Quote by David Amram

There is a quiet flex embedded in David Amram's praise: he’s not just vouching for Allen Ginsberg’s talent, he’s certifying his range. By calling Ginsberg a "world authority" on William Blake, Amram frames him as more than the bearded Beat caricature or headline magnet. He’s positioning Ginsberg inside a lineage of serious, almost priestly readers of visionary literature, where Blake isn’t an aesthetic preference but a key to a whole cosmology.

The line works because it triangulates three kinds of credibility that rarely sit together without strain: deep scholarship ("world authority"), canonical literacy ("classic literature"), and sharp civic awareness ("world politics"). Amram, a composer who moved between jazz, film, and the Beats, is making a cultural argument about what a modern artist should be: porous to tradition, alert to power, and capable of translating both into public energy. The phrasing "incredible knowledge" is purposely plainspoken, less academic credentialing than eyewitness testimony from someone who watched Ginsberg in rooms where ideas mattered.

Subtext: stop reducing Ginsberg to vibe and scandal. The Beats often get remembered as a style - cigarettes, poems, rebellion - and Amram is insisting on the infrastructure beneath the style: study, memory, and political literacy. It’s also a defense of interdisciplinarity. In a mid-century America that liked its artists either harmless or decorative, this is Amram arguing that Ginsberg’s authority came from taking the world seriously, not escaping it.